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i LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 






! UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. J 






Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by 

THOMAS W. HARTLEY, 

in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. 

MOORE BROTHERS, PRINTERS. 




TO 

JEREMIAH O'DONOVAN ROSSA, 

AND HIS COMPATRIOTS 

IN THE 

IN THE HOPE THAT ALMIGHTY GOD WILL BLESS THEM IN THEIR 

ADVERSITY, SUCCOR THEM IN THEIR NEED, STRENGTHEN 

THEM IN THEIR ARMS, CROWN THEM IN THEIR 

EFFORTS, AND GUIDE THEM 

IN THEIR LIBERTY, 

THIS BOOK IS 



jhespccfjfiillg Jjnticaiccl. 





PREFACE. 

7$*!w!M]kHE patriotic course and manly character of General 
JoW^S Thomas F. Burke, in his efforts to free Ireland from the 
Sli^gSSSL chains of slavery, and the recent conditional release of 
the Fenian state prisoners by the British Government, have in- 
duced the publication of this little volume. 

Love of country and patriotic emotions are the native instincts 
of the Irishman's heart. He draws the inspiration from his 
mother's breast ; he cherishes it in his youth, and practises it in 
his manhood. It was this feeling of devotion to his native country 
that stimulated the noble Burke in the cause of emancipation. 
For it, he was sentenced to die. This sentence of death was after- 
ward commuted to imprisonment for life. And now, to add fuel to 
the flames, all the Fenian state prisoners, including Burke, having 
been released from the most unjust incarceration, are obliged to 
suffer banishment from the soil of their birth. 

Through all the struggles and trials and vicissitudes of life to 
which Burke has been subjected, he has acted a fearless and manly 



Vlll PREFACE. 

part. In council and in camp — in peace and in war — in court 
and in prison — the freedom of his native land was uppermost in his 
thoughts. How faithfully did he obey the mandate of his aged 
and heroic mother when she bade him, "Go, my boy; return 
either with your shield or upon it." It was this sentiment that 
nerved him to stand before the court, who sat in judgment upon 
him, and exclaim : 

"In thoughts that breathe and words that burn," 

" My lords ! ' It is sweet to die for one's country.' " 

Posterity will weave garlands around the brows of Curran and 
O'Connell, of Emmet and Burke, and their compeers in the great 
work of Ireland's emancipation; and their hallowed names will be 
consecrated, and live in history and song as co-laborers in the 
cause of republican institutions and human rights long after the 
minions of that tyranny, which has subjected the people of Ireland 
to the most abject and degrading thraldom, shall be forgotten. 

If the publication of the speech of Thomas F. Burke, and the com- 
ments on the " Fenian Amnesty " will do aught to promote the 
cause of Ireland's emancipation — cause one tear to bedew the 
shrubbery planted in admiration over the graves of her patriot 
dead, or inspire the hearts of her heroic living with deeds of noble 
daring — then we have not issued this volume in vain. 





SPEECH OF 

GENERAL THOMAS F. BURKE, 

ON BEING ASKED BY THE CHIEF JUSTICE WHY JUDGMENT OF DEATH SHOULD 
NOT BE PRONOUNCED AGAINST HIM. 

HE speech of General Thomas F. Burke is one which 
will become memorable in our history ; and having 
had an opportunity to give a full, correct, and au- 
thentic publication of it, we are certain our readers will most 
heartily approve of its republication. We therefore give, from 
"The Irishman," a version of it without an error; and we deem 
it worthy of this careful preparation as it will remain among 
B 9 




10 SPEECH OF GENERAL THOMAS F. BURKE. 

the archives of our nationality, a state paper testifying to other men 
and other times the character, the courage, and the dignity of the 
man who spoke it in the dock at Newgate. A man of feeling the 
most intense, he alluded gracefully, and without giving way for a mo- 
ment, to the ties that bound him to home and life. It is at such an 
hour as that which he met and endured that the revulsion of the emo- 
tions is stronger than pride and resistance. The heart will assert its 
sway if there be not a higher principle to still its tumultuous throb- 
bings. That higher principle must have been the stay of Thomas F. 
Burke when he uttered that wonderful piece of oratory which would, 
if nothing else could do it, rescue his memory from reproach or 
oblivion. It is a voice from the grave, speaking to friends and foes. 
He proclaimed his principles, his hopes, and aspirations like a man 
who depended upon the proclamation for justice to his life, and 
who left it as a legacy to the future that no one could asperse his 
fame when he lay in his silent grave. To a man like this, fame was 
dearer than life itself, and he gave expression to that sentiment 
clearly enough. " Justice to my memory" was the prayer of 
Emmet. In the same dock, in the same court, almost in the same 
spot, Thomas F. Burke lifted his voice in the hope and faith that, no 
matter who differed with him or who believed with him, he left his 
reputation unsullied and his name unstained. He knew, for he 
could not be ignorant of it, that above the grave of the dead the 
memory of the sleeper below is often, too often, carelessly treated. 
" Lightly they talk of the spirit that's gone." And'it was to pro- 



SPEECH OF GENERAL THOMAS F. BURKE. II 

vide against the sharpest and most envenomed wrong an honorable 
and honest man can contemplate that as Emmet spoke so Burke 
spoke. It is surely mournful, most mournful, that men of such 
souls as these have had to meet, through all our history, the trai- 
tor's doom and the felon's fate in the history of our pacification. 
Two hundred years ago, when Mountjoy delivered up the country 
to Elizabeth, " carcasses and ashes," the Government of the day 
felicitated itself that it was done with the Irish rebels. When 
Sheares lay headless on the scaffold at Green Street, when Lord 
Edward Fitzgerald lay dead within the jail, when Thomas Addis 
Emmet was in exile, the same felicitations were again renewed. 
They were repeated when that " boy-traitor," his brother, hung 
swaying in the wind from the fatal tree in Thomas Street; and so 
runs the history down to our own times. There never was a more 
glowing expression of the feelings that actuated men like these 
than that with which Thomas F. Burke met his doom. In it all there 
is not a tone of the braggart's voice. Were it a Pole who spoke it 
upon some Russian scaffold, it would make the cause in which it 
was uttered ring through Europe ; were it a Hungarian or a Vene- 
tian, under Austrian rule, who gave up his life with such a procla- 
mation of the feelings that actuated him, it would make a plea to 
which Europe would listen. It was not a representative of either 
of those nationalities who spoke the speech; and it can only remain 
upon record as the most eloquent and dignified speech ever made 
upon such an occasion since the days of Robert Emmet. No one 



12 SPEECH OF GENERAL THOMAS F. BURKE. 

who heard it can ever forget it ; no one who stood or sat in that 
crowded court, when in the intense excitement of the moment 
every breath was hushed, and amidst a silence as deep as that of 
the grave, when every glance was turned upon him, he moved to 
the bar to speak, and lifting his head, whilst his cheek flushed and 
his eye gleamed quick fires, began : — 



" My Lords, it is not my intention to occupy much of your time 
in answer to the question why the sentence of the court should 
not be passed upon me ; but I may, with your permission, review a 
little of the evidence that has been brought against me. The first 
evidence is that of Sub-Inspector Kelly, who had the conversation 
with me at Clonmal, in Tipperary. He states that he asked me 
then what about my friend, Mr. Stephens ; that I made answer and 
said he was the most idolized man that ever was, or ever would be, 
in America. Here, standing on the brink of my grave, in the pres- 
ence of the Almighty and ever-living God, I brand that as being 
the foulest perjury that ever a man gave utterance to. No such 
conversation ever occurred ; the name of Stephens was not men- 
tioned. I shall pass from that, and then touch on the evidence of 
Britt. He says I assisted in distributing bread to the parties at the 
fort, and that I stood with him on the wagon or cart. That also 
is false. I was not in the fort at the time. I was not there when 
the bread was being distributed. I came in afterward. All these 
assertions have been made and submitted to the men in whose 



SPEECH OF GENERAL THOMAS F. BURKE. 13 

hands my life has been placed, as evidence made on oath by these 
men, solely and purely for the purpose of giving my body to an 
untimely grave. There are many points, my lord, that have been 
sworn to here to prove my complicity, and a great many acts have 
been alleged that I took part in. It is not my intention to give 
utterance to one word against the sentence that has been pro- 
nounced against me. I feel fully conscious of my honor as a man, 
which has never been impugned, fully conscious that I can go into 
my grave with a name and character unsullied. I can say that 
these parties, either actuated by a desire for their own aggrandize- 
ment or to save their paltry and miserable lives, have pandered to 
the appetites, if I may so speak, of justice, and my life is to pay 
the forfeit. Fully convinced and satisfied of the righteousness of 
my every act in connection with this alleged revolutionary move- 
ment in Ireland, I have nothing to recall, nothing that I would 
undo, nothing to bring up the blush of shame to mantle on my 
brow. My conduct and career, both here and in America, of which 
I have been a citizen, and, if you like, a soldier, is before you ; and 
I feel in this very hour of trial the consciousness of having lived 
an honest man, and I will die proudly, believing that, if I have 
given material aid to give freedom and liberty to the land of my 
birth, I have done only that which every Irishman whose soul 
throbs with a feeling of liberty should do. I feel I should not 
mention the name of Massey. I feel I should not pollute my lips 
with the name of that traitor, whose illegitimacy has been proved 



L 



14 SPEECH OF GENERAL THOMAS F. BURKE. 

here, tlie man whose name is not known, and who, I deny point- 
blank, ever wore the star of colonel in the Confederate army. I 
shall let him rest I shall pass him, wishing him, in the words 
of the poet, — 

' May the grass wither from his feet ! the woods 
Deny him shelter ! earth a home ! the dust 
A grave ! the sun his light ! and heaven her God ! ' 

Let Massey remember from this day forth he carries with him, as 
my able and learned counsel, Mr. Dowse, has stated, a serpent that 
will gnaw his conscience; carrying about with him in his breast a 
living hell from which he can never be separated. I, my lords, have 
no desire for the name of a martyr. I ask not the death of a mar- 
tyr. But if it is the will of that Almighty and Omnipotent God, 
that my devotion to the land of my birth shall be tested on the 
scaffold, I am willing there to die in defence of the rights of men 
to a free government, and of the rights of an oppressed people to 
throw off the yoke of thraldom. I am an Irishman by birth, an 
American by adoption ; by nature a lover of freedom, and an 
enemy to that power that holds my native land in the bonds of 
tyranny. It has so often been admitted that the oppressed have a 
right to throw off the yoke of the oppressor, even by English 
statesmen, that I deem it unnecessary to revert to that fact in a 
British court of justice. Ireland's children are not, never can, and 
never will be, willing and submissive slaves. And so long as the 



SPEECH OF GENERAL THOMAS F. BURKE. 15 

English flag covers one inch of Irish soil, just so long will they, 
believing it to be a divine right, 'conspire, imagine, and devise' 
means to hurl it from power, and erect in its stead the godlike 
structure of self-government. 

I know that I am here without a relative — without a friend, in 
fact — three thousand miles away from my family. But I know 
that I am not forgotten there. The great and generous Irish heart 
of America to-day feels for me — to-day sympathizes with and does 
not forget the man who is willing to tread the scaffold — ay, defi- 
antly, proudly conscious of having to suffer in defence of liberty. 
I shall now, my lords, as no doubt you will suggest the propriety 
of turning attention to the world beyond the grave ; I shall now 
look only to that home where sorrows are at an end, where joy is 
eternal, and I shall hope and pray that freedom may yet dawn on 
this poor down - trodden country. That is my hope, that is my 
prayer, and the last words I shall utter will be a prayer to God foi 
forgiveness and a prayer for poor old Ireland. Now, my lords, in 
relation to the informer, Corydan, I will make a few remarks. I 
never attended a meeting at Colonel Kelly's ; and the other state- 
ments that have been made on oath by him to you, gentlemen of 
the jury, I solemnly now declare on my oath as a man — ay, as a 
dying man — have been totally unfounded, and have all been false 
from beginning to end. In relation to the small paper introduced 
to you, and brought against me as evidence of my having been using 
that oath, I desire to say that that paper was not taken from my 



l6 SPEECH OF GENERAL THOMAS F. BURKE. 

person. I know no person whose name is on that paper. That 
paper has been put in for a purpose, but I swear positively it is not 
in my handwriting; I can also swear I never saw it; yet it is held 
in evidence against me. Is this justice? or is it right? Is this 
manly ? I am willing, if I have transgressed the laws, to suffer the 
punishment of my offence. But I object to this system of trump- 
ing up a case to take away the life of a human being. I ask for no 
mercy. With my present emaciated frame, and my constitution 
somewhat shattered, it is better that my life should be brought to 
an end than that I should drag out a miserable existence in the 
prison-pens of Portland. Thus it is, my lords, I accept of the ver- 
dict : of course my acceptance of it is unnecessary ; but I am satis- 
fied with it, and now I shall close. There are many feelings that 
actuate me at this moment. In fact, these few disconnected remarks 
can give no idea of what I desire to say to the court. I have a 
family I love as much as any man in this court can love his. I can 
remember the blessings of my aged mother as I left her for the 
last time. She then spoke as the Spartan mother of old, ' Go, my 
boy ; return either with your shield or upon it.' This consoles me : 
this gives me heart to submit to my doom; and I hope that God 
will forgive me past sins. I hope, too, that inasmuch as for seven 
hundred years He has preserved Ireland, notwithstanding the 
tyranny to which she has been subject, that as a separate and dis- 
tinct nationality, He will also assist her to retrieve her fallen for- 
tunes, and to rise in her beauty, the sister of Columbia, the peer of 
any nation in the world." 




THE FENIAN AMNESTY.* 

^^HE condition which the Government has affixed to 
^5 its liberation of the Fenian prisoners seems to us 
to be a miserable mistake, unwise, ungenerous, and 
unjust. To claim credit for it "as an act of pure clemency," 
which not even the most malignant enemy of the Government 
dare venture to misrepresent, is hardly worthy of Mr. Glad- 
stone's keen intelligence and serious character. If it be proper 
to append Queen Victoria's name to an act of amnesty granted to 
Irish rebels, it should not be coupled with conditions which even 
Louis Napoleon would have been ashamed to subjoin to an 
amnesty offered to the most dangerous and unscrupulous of the 
French Reds. After all, the condition affixed to the liberation of 
these unhappy men is neither more nor less than banishment for 
life. They are required to leave the United Kingdom, and to 
undertake not to return to it. This sweeping and perpetual sen- 
tence is made applicable to all of them, though there is a wide 

*From the "London Spectator." 

c 17 



IS THE FENIAN AMNESTY. 

variety in their degree of guilt, and also in the terms of imprison- 
ment to which they are liable.* Some of them, like Burke and 
Mackay, have had sentence of death for levying war against the 
Queen commuted to imprisonment for life; some, like Luby and 
Mulcahy, now five years in jail, have gone through a great part 
of the period of punishment imposed upon them for writing news- 
paper articles which the Irish courts considered treasonable in the 
good old time when Sir Robert Peel, being Chief Secretary, 
declared that he and Lord Palmerston would stand or fall with the 
Irish Church, and when Mr. Cardwell solemnly warned the Irish 
people that Parliament would never listen to their demands for 
tenant-right. If Parliament has been wise in the work it has done 
during the last two sessions, there was surely some little excuse for 
strong writing in those days. To pass a fresh sentence of per- 
petual exile on such men, and on others whose sentences were only 
for spaces of seven and five years, and who would, therefore, be 
absolutely entitled to their liberty after a comparatively short period 
of further restraint — on men who have, in many cases, suffered so 
considerable a portion of their sentence as has often sufficed to let 
some hardened thief or desperate garroter loose on our streets with 
a ticket-of-leave — on men the degree of whose guilt it would be 

* The Dublin newspapers, speaking of the terms of the amnesty to the Fenian convicts, say that the con- 
ditions of the pardons are that the released prisoners shall not return to Ireland until after the expiration of 
their respective sentences. Those condemned to five years' penal servitude will be free to return in about a 
year, and those sentenced to twenty years will be exiled for fifteen years. It was at first supposed that the 
banishment was to be perpetual. 



THE FENIAN AMNESTY. IQ 

impossible to distinguish from that of their comrades to whom a 
full and unconditional pardon was given two years ago — to do this 
is, we do not hesitate to say, simply, utterly, and flagrantly unjust. 
But apart from this general consideration of the case, these 
unfortunate men are, we venture to assert, entitled to claim their 
liberation from Mr. Gladstone, if not as an absolute right, still in 
virtue of an undertaking on his part, in some degree conditioned 
by circumstances which very decidedly deprive it of the quality of 
"an act of pure clemency." When the Peace Preservation Act was 
before the House of Commons last March, the late Mr. Moore, M.P. 
for Mayo, had given notice of his intention to bring the case of the 
Irish political prisoners before Parliament. Such a motion, at the 
moment, might have proved embarrassing. The Government was, 
at all events, exceedingly anxious to become possessed, with as 
little delay as possible, of the necessary but formidable weapon of 
law then in rapid process of fabrication. Some communications of 
the kind usual in such cases no doubt took place, for Mr. Glad- 
stone, on the 17th of March, submitted to the process of an inter- 
pellation on the part of Mr. Moore, the course of which had evi- 
dently been arranged beforehand. A certain vague and gloomy 
amphibology, nevertheless, pervaded Mr. Gladstone's answer, which 
dissatisfied Mr. Moore, a man of vivid and precise phrase ; and four 
days afterward, when the question came on again, it transpired that 
Mr. Gladstone had agreed beforehand to give an answer in terms 
somewhat more distinct. These are the precise terms which Mr. 



20 THE FENIAN AMNESTY. 

Moore embodied in his notice of a second question which he 
addressed to the Prime Minister on the 31st of March: "That the 
consideration of this question [the liberation of the prisoners] must 
necessarily depend upon the restoration of law and order in Ireland ; 
and as soon as the disorders now prevailing in that country are 
repressed, Mr. Gladstone trusts that he will be able to give a very 
different answer to Mr. Moore, and to announce the liberation of 
the political prisoners." 

Mr. Gladstone said in reply that this was the very meaning he 
had intended to convey on the previous evening. But what, may 
we ask, did Mr. Gladstone mean by the word " liberation " ? Did 
he mean transportation for life ? We know no case in which a 
political amnesty has been so interpreted, except that of Poerio and 
his comrades, who, having been deported to the United States by 
the King of Naples, mutinied on the voyage, and carried their 
transport into Cork. But it is evident that Mr. Gladstone did not 
mean to transport the Irish political prisoners to America at the 
time that he gave the answer to which Mr. Moore objected as defi- 
cient in clearness and savor; because, in that answer, he spoke of 
the cruelty it would be to hold out misleading hopes prematurely 
to the friends of the prisoners. If it had been his intention then to 
release those prisoners on Christmas eve, with the one condition 
that they should never see their homes, families, and friends again, 
then, we must say, so much and such ostentatious consideration for 
the feelings of their friends and families might well have been 



THE FENIAN AMNESTY. 21 

spared. Nor need the whole population of Ireland have been 
bound over to keep the peace on public conditions expressed in 
Parliament, if such was the sort of political amnesty that her 
Majesty's ministers ultimately contemplated. It was not, perhaps, 
wise statesmanship so to identify the case of the political prisoners 
with the conduct of the general population, that their liberation 
should be made to depend on the amount of crime perpetrated 
during the following six months or so. But at all events the Peace 
Preservation Act appears to have answered its purpose. Law and 
order have been, so to speak, restored in Ireland. The disorders 
which prevailed in that country last March have been repressed. 
Mr. Moore, however, no longer lives to claim the very different 
answer which Mr. Gladstone held out the hope of his being able to 
give. Under such circumstances, to interpret " liberation " as 
meaning " banishment" is, at least, ungenerous. Of all the causes 
which have contributed to make the relations between the two 
countries so bitter and bloody, hardly any has been so potent as 
this holding the word of promise to the ear at one time, and quib- 
bling it away at another, with professions that have, to the mind 
of a people at once simple and suspicious, all the effect of a some- 
what solemn and exuberant insincerity. * 

But the unwisdom of sending these men to the United States at 
this moment — for the United States is, of course, the one country 
outside the United Kingdom open to them in the present state of 
the world — has in it something so inconsiderate as to be almost 



22 THE FENIAN AMNESTY. 

appalling. What must these men do of mere necessity when they 
arrive there ? It would be too much to expect that a feeling of 
loyal gratitude should grow in their bosoms during the Atlantic 
voyage in consequence of the degree of " liberation " in which they 
have been indulged. These convicts, who were picking oakum or 
breaking stones a week ago, will arrive at New York, and find them- 
selves the idols of a popular ovation and in recognized command 
of a great political influence. The Irish vote will be at their bid- 
ding, at a time when the relations of America with England are 
again assuming a very anxious character. The city of New York 
will doubtless receive them with public honors. They may be 
admitted to the floor of the Senate and entertained at the White 
House. The fact remains that at a time when the Fenian organiza- 
tion in the United States had fallen into a state of almost complete 
collapse from lack of leadership, we are sending its most daring 
and able spirits to the very base of the operations of the conspiracy. 
Ere many weeks, we may reasonably expect to hear that Luby and 
Mulcahy are "stumping" the Union in aid of the Russo-Prusso- 
American alliance, while Burke and Mackay are directing opera- 
tions on the Canadian frontier to illustrate President Grant's 
peculiar views of that " irresponsible Dominion." It certainly is 
not wise statesmanship to send these men to the one part of the 
world where they may, and almost must, make much mischief; 
where there is every temptation to them to resume their old courses, 
and where those courses, at present, are the high road to popularity, 
influence, and means. 



THE FENIAN AMNESTY. 23 

If it were proper to couple conditions with an act of pure clem- 
ency, there is one which might, with advantage, be substituted for 
that which Mr. Gladstone has imposed. The political prisoners 
might have been bound to return to and to remain in Ireland. 
There they would find that the great injustices whose existence 
made political conspiracy possible ten years ago have been sum- 
marily abolished. They would find a popular executive armed 
with powers ample and effectual to enable them to answer for the 
peace of the country. They would, in their own despite, serve as 
living monuments of the clemency of a wise and fearless Govern- 
ment. The Irish administration would hardly shrink from such an 
addition to their charge — for this is not a time to make things 
easy to the Irish executive at the expense of the empire. Is it too 
late to hope that before this ungenerous and impolitic condition is 
enforced, the sovereign herself may object to have the quality of 
her mercy strained after such a fashion ? If such an act were pos- 
sible, that is to say constitutional, it would make the royal clem- 
ency a word of pure and serious meaning from shore to shore of 
Ireland. 




